From: Hughes, James (james.hughes@trincoll.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 18:02:12 MDT
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/nycu/tech/nextnews/archive/next030730.htm
By James M. Pethokoukis
Posted: July 30, 2003
The Big Ideas of Robin Hanson
In the background of the Pentagon's controversial-and now defunct-plan
to create a futures market to predict terrorist strikes is a
little-known George Mason University economist named Robin Hanson.
Little known, that is, among those who view economists as little more
than number crunchers whose main job it is to provide those usually
dodgy estimates of what the economy's growth or unemployment rate is
likely to be in some future quarter.
But for those who have an interest in what life might be like if we
lived in a Matrix-like computer simulation or how superintelligent
computers could someday affect economic growth, Hanson is as hot as they
come. His work on information markets-markets where "investors" make
bets on the likelihood of certain future events-was critical to the
development of the terrorism futures market, formally called the Policy
Analysis Market, which was funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
Although Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described the effort as
"too imaginative," it really pales by comparison to some of the other
creative thoughts bouncing around Hanson's noggin-which shouldn't be
surprising for a guy who says he'd "love to specialize in the economics
of science fiction." Among the treats on his home page are his "14 Wild
Ideas." Hanson says up to a third of them may actually be true-though,
maddeningly, he doesn't specify which ones. Here are a few:
By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers
running brain simulations. "Simulated brains are potentially immortal,
just as all computer data is. And the ability to cheaply simulate brains
will revolutionize labor economics; wages should fall to near the cost
of making brain simulators. The population of such 'uploads' should
expand very rapidly, allowing huge increases in both economic growth
rates and inequality."
If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much,
they would be just as healthy. "In the 1970s, the Rand Health Insurance
Experiment randomly assigned 5,000 adults to free or full-price
healthcare over 3-5 years. Free-care folks got more eyeglasses and teeth
filled, and spent about 30 percent more, but were otherwise no
healthier. . . . I'm willing to extrapolate from this 30 percent change
to a 50 percent cut."
There's a chance that Hanson himself lives in a "future" computer
simulation. "Some uploads [people who have uploaded their brains into
computers] could have robot bodies, while others could live in simulated
computer worlds. Our descendants may place some of them in historical
simulations, with simulated people who do not realize that they are
simulated. How sure can I be now that I do not live in a future
historical simulation?"
Visitors to Hanson's Web site will find plenty of academic papers
supporting these and other notions, including his belief that all major
government policies should be determined by betting markets such as the
Policy Analysis Market.
Now given Hanson's areas of interest, I thought he would be the perfect
guy to comment on a prediction that's been crawling around the Web in
recent days. Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks, recently
published an essay in which he predicts that advances in artificial
intelligence and robotics will result in smart machines taking half the
jobs in the United States by 2050. Hanson's take on the forecast?
"His predictions about future progress in robotic technology are not
crazy, even if they are not assured. He ignores the software
problem-even if robots have more computing power than the brain, it may
take a while for software to be good enough. But it is not crazy to
think the software problem might be solved within a decade or two of
when we have enough hardware. His social predictions are more of a mixed
bag. . . . For example, he doesn't consider that people who leave some
jobs might find others. Automation has taken away most farming jobs, but
that hasn't made most people unemployed; people now do other things that
they do better than machines. . . . However, a closer examination does,
I think, suggest that eventually machines will become mostly substitutes
for, rather than complements of, human labor."
As Hanson continues to creatively cogitate, I'll let you know what he
comes up with.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Aug 02 2003 - 10:02:11 MDT